Monday, March 25, 2013

Jewish Humour: Drinking

Monday Humor

Much of the Jewish humour on this site can be found in this wonderful book: The Encyclopedia of Jewish Humor, compiled and edited by Henry D. Spalding.

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This week's humour is focused on Drinking:

Ben Cohen had been drinking at a pub all night. The bartender finally said that the bar was closing. So Ben stood up to leave and fell flat on his face. He tried to stand one more time; same result. Ben figured he'll crawl outside and get some fresh air and maybe that would sober him up.

Once outside, Ben stood up but fell flat on his face again. So he decided to crawl the 4 blocks to his home. When he arrived at the door, Ben stood up and again fell flat on his face. He crawled through the door and into his bedroom. When he reached his bed Ben tried one more time to stand up. This time he managed to pull himself upright, but he quickly fell right into bed and fell sound asleep as soon as his head hit the pillow. He was awakened the next morning to his wife, Yente, standing over him, shouting, "So, you've been out drinking again!" "What makes you say that?" Ben asked, putting on an innocent look.

Yente replied "The pub called—you left your wheelchair there again."

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This guy goes into the bar every night and orders three beers. In fact every night he goes into the bar and orders three beers and drinks them all by himself. Three beers...every night. Not two. Never 4. Always 3.

Well, the bartender can't figure this out. Without fail this guy comes in. The bartender finally says to the guy "Every night you come in here and have three beers. There must be a story to this. You never order two beers, or four beers; always three."

The guy says "Yes, there is a story." You see, me and my two buddies always went out for a beer at night when we were in Vietnam. One night while we were drinking we decided that we could continue doing this when we return to the States. We also decided if one of us didn't make it, the other two would drink the third one's beer. And if two didn't make it, the third guy would drink the other two beers. The other two didn't make it back so I'm drinking

theirs."

The bartender felt bad.

Well, the next night the guy came back into the bar as usual but only ordered two beers. The bartender couldn't believe it. Night after night this guy now orders only two beers. This went on for some time and the bartender was sopuzzled he just had to ask the guy about it.

The bartender says to him, "I noticed you have only been ordering two beers for the last few weeks. There has to be a story here."

The guy says, "Yes indeed there is a story. You see I joined the Mormon Church and I can't drink beer any more."

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You must have heard about the Jew from Soviet Georgia who came to Israel to live. Well every night or so he would get together with his Gruzzini friends and eat and drink into the night. Then one night when he and his friends were eating together, they started to open a bottle of wine to make a lechaim as is traditional at these nightly meals. "No, sorry." The man refused his friends' offer of a little wine, "I was at the doctor's office today and the doctor told me that I can't drink wine or spirits any more; it's bad for my health," he apologized.

"What do you mean?" they queried. "We always get together, eat and make lachaims. Are you really not going to drink with us?" they asked.

"Sorry, but what can I do? That's the doctor's orders!"

The next evening they all got together again and began to eat and drink. "Let's make a lechaim!" They started to pour themselves each a large glass of wine.

"What, again you are not going to drink with us?" his friends complained.

"What can I do? Doctor's orders," the man explained.

And again the scene was repeated the next night also. "What, are you serious?" his friends complained. "Are you going to spend the rest of your life with out drinking? You'll ruin your life!"

"What can I do? Doctor's orders," the man sadly explained.

The next night when they got together to eat and drink. They began to pour each other a lachaim. However this time the man stuck out his glass "here, fill up my glass with some of that wine!"

Astounded, his friends stared at him in amazement. "What happened? We thought that it was forbidden for you to drink wine? Doctor's orders and all?"

"Well," the man began to explain, "I went to the doctor and asked him if it was still bad for my health to drink and he said yes. So I took out fifty dollars and slipped it to him under the table. So he changed his mind and said it would be OK to drink!"

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Yiddish Sites (listed since August 2017)

There are dozens of sites dedicated to Yiddish language, culture and music. Here are some that I have found noteworthy. I will add to the list regularly. If you have a Yiddish site or know of one, please do not hesitate to contact me atpjgreenbaum@gmail.com:

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Afn Shvel(“On the Threshold”), a magazine published by the League for Yiddish, dating to 1941, it is committed to the promotion and preservation of the Yiddish language and culture. It published two double issues a year. Its editor-in-chief is Sheva Zucker;

American Jewish Archive at Hebrew Union College’s Jewish Institute of Religion contains more than 10 million pages of documents. manuscripts, genealogical materials, as well as thousands of audiovisual recordings, photographs, microfilm and digital collections;

Center for Jewish History, in New York City, has 5 miles of archival material (in dozens of languages), more than 500,000 volumes, as well asthousands of artworks, textiles, ritual objects, recordings and photographs;

JewishGen Yizkor Book Project, a database of more than 1,000 yizkor books worldwide, a good number of them have been translated from Hebrew and Yiddish into English;

Language and Cultural Atlas of Ashkenazic Jews,from Columbia University,consists of 5,755 hours of audio tape interviews with Yiddish-speaking Jews from Central and eastern Europe, done between 1959 and 1972 along with around 100,000 pages of linguistic field notes;

Lexilogos, a compilation of Yiddish online resources, including dictionaries, grammar books, and a translation of the Torah (Toyre) in Yiddish;

Milken Archive of Jewish Music, a record of the American Jewish Experience; since 1990, it has become the largest collection of American Jewish music with about 600 recorded works, including a number in Yiddish;

Museum of the Yiddish Theatre, an online museum originating in New York City and founded by Dr. Steven Lasky, has in its collection such items as photographs, theatre programs, sheet music, audio recordings and other documents of some importance and historical significance;

Pakn Treger, (“itinerant bookseller in Eastern Europe who traveled from shtetl to shtetl ”), the magazine of the Yiddish Book Centre;

Recorded Sound Archives (RSA) of Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton contains more than 100,000 recordings of music, a great many in Yiddish;

Songs of My People, a site by Josephine Yalovitser dedicated to Yiddish songs of mourning and of joy;

The National Center For Jewish Film, based at Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass., is the home to 15,000 reels of feature films, documentaries, newsreels, home movies and institutional films, dating from 1903 to the present; this effort has led to the revival of Yiddish cinema;

Yizkor Book Collection at the New York Public Library provide a documentation of daily life, through essays and photographs and the memoralizing of murdered residents, of Jewish communities destroyed in the Holocaust. Of the 750 yizkor books in its collection, 618 have been digitalized. Most yizkor books are in Yiddish or Hebrew;

YUNG YiDiSH, a site dedicated to preserving and promoting Yiddish culture in Israel;